[Peace-discuss] Banality of Evil

[Karen Aram]

Wayne, I do agree with you in respect to individuals being scapegoats, though I support justice and individuals taking responsibility for their actions. Eichmann's trial and execution was just that, a show to appease, allowing many collectively to escape justice. Perhaps it brought solace to surviving victims, but I doubt it. 
 
Carl, I have to reread your statements more than once to comprehend, will comment at a later date. I enjoy the discussion/food for thought from you both.
 
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Banality of Evil
From: galliher at illinois.edu
Date: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 20:27:17 -0500
CC: karenaram at hotmail.com; stuartnlevy at gmail.com; peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
To: ewj at pigsqq.org

The scapegoat theme is worth pursuing. I keep running into (as in a traffic accident) the work of Rene Girard. I think the cosmos is trying to tell me something. 
"...The phrase 'scapegoat mechanism' was not coined by Girard himself; it had been used earlier by Kenneth Burke in Permanence and Change (1935) and A Grammar of Motives (1940). However, Girard took this concept from Burke and developed it much more extensively as an interpretation of human culture.

"In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), Girard develops the implications of this discovery. The victimary process is the missing link between the animal world and the human world, the principle that explains the humanization of primates. It allows us to understand the need for sacrificial victims, which in turn explains the hunt which is primitively ritual, and the domestication of animals as a fortuitous result of the acclimatization of a reserve of victims, or agriculture. It shows that at the beginning of all culture is archaic religion, which Durkheim had sensed[citation needed]. The elaboration of the rites and taboos by proto-human or human groups would take infinitely varied forms while obeying a rigorous practical sense that we can detect: the prevention of the return of the mimetic crisis. So we can find in archaic religion the origin of all political or cultural institutions.

"According to Girard, just as the theory of Natural selection of species is the rational principle that explains the immense diversity of forms of life, the victimization process is the rational principle that explains the origin of the infinite diversity of cultural forms. The analogy with Darwin also extends to the scientific status of the theory, as each of these presents itself as a hypothesis that is not capable of being proven experimentally, given the extreme amounts of time necessary to the production of the phenomena in question, but which imposes itself by its great explanatory power."

On Aug 24, 2013, at 8:15 PM, "E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森" <ewj at pigsqq.org> wrote:



On 08/25/13 6:30, Karen Aram wrote:

  
  In reference to some of our discussions at the Market
this morning related to the film and writings of Hannah Arendt, and her
"banality of evil" I attach the below. I consider not Adolph Eichmann,
but many here in the US, myself included, as the banality of evil, when
viewing through the eyes of many elsewhere in the world. We drive our
SUV's, feed our pets better food than some people receive, shop until
we drop, consuming resources that cannot be replaced, and allowing wars
and killings to take place in the name of "self defense". 

  



I would agree that after you have made certain that the last human

is ok, then you take care of the first dog, but my attitude is angering

to some.



I consider Eichmann to be a scapegoat, much like Bin Laden and Michael
Vick.



Having said that humans are so much more valuable that dogs 

[worst human >> best dog], now I must say that there is great

evil possible in the action of masses of human.  Alone an 

individual can do relatively little evil.



Scapegoats provide the hoi polloi a focus upon which to fix the
pointless banality of their

useless lives of vanity.  








 		 	   		  
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